Agence France Presse • Reuters

TIKRIT, 4 January 2004 — Four Iraqis, including a woman and a child, were killed yesterday when a US convoy opened fire on a car trying to overtake it in the northern town of Tikrit, police said. The US military said it was looking into an incident in the town, but no immediate comment was available. “The car, a gray Chevrolet Caprice, was hit by 27 shots and skidded, resulting in the death of four people, including a woman and a nine year-old child,” Tikrit police chief Col. Ussama Adham Abdel Ghaffer told AFP.

A US soldier was killed in a mortar assault on a military base north of Baghdad, the US Army said, and a top commander warned attacks by Iraqi guerrillas were growing more sophisticated.

Several mortars were fired at a base near the town of Balad, about 80 km north of the capital Baghdad, on Friday evening, killing one soldier and wounding two others, all from the 4th Infantry Division, a US Army spokesman said. “The base came under mortar attack and one soldier was killed by shrapnel, while two others were wounded,” Sgt. Robert Cargie of the 4th Infantry Division told reporters.

He said six people were detained in connection with the assault. The two wounded soldiers, who were taken to a nearby field hospital, were in a stable condition. News of the attack came a day after guerrillas shot down an OH-58 Kiowa Warrior helicopter outside the town of Fallujah, west of Baghdad. It was the sixth US helicopter to be brought down by Iraqi insurgents since October.

A policeman who witnessed the crash said the chopper was hit by a missile before falling to the ground. One pilot was killed and the other wounded. It was the first time a Kiowa, a nimble craft used for observation, had been shot down in Iraq. US forces quickly surrounded the crash site to keep witnesses and journalists at bay.

American soldiers detained three Iraqis working for Reuters as they covered the aftermath of the crash. A Reuters driver working with the three said they had earlier been fired on by US troops as they filmed a checkpoint close to the site.

US Army spokesman Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt separately told a news conference in Baghdad that guerrillas posing as journalists had fired on US soldiers guarding the area and four were later detained. Kimmitt also said the number of guerrilla attacks was falling but warned they were getting more sophisticated.

In Kirkuk, ethnic tensions that have flared on several occasions in recent days, resulting in the deaths of at least six Iraqis, appeared to abate as US forces and local authorities imposed a curfew. Tensions boiled to the surface on Wednesday after Arab and Turkish-speaking Turkmen residents marched on the headquarters of a Kurdish party in the oil-rich city to protest against a Kurdish political push for more control in the area.